Language rights can be protected in two levels, namely, under national and international law. This paper deals with linguistic minorities and language legislation in Finland, which has language legislation providing relatively high level of support for minority languages. Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. Swedish is at the same time a minority language in Finland. In addition to Swedish, Finland has Saami, Romany and Finnish sign language as its minority languages. We should also make a distinction between Swedish speakers of the Åland islands and mainland Swedish-speaking population. The province of Åland has a extremely high level of autonomy, and the only official language there is Swedish. So Finland has five minority groups, Swedish speakers of Åland, mainland Swedish-speaking population, the Saami people, the Roma and the users of Finnish sign language. We can divide language legislation concerning linguistic minorities into three groups, on the basis of principles of territoriality and personality. Language legislation for Swedish speakers of Åland and the Saami people is based on the territorial principle, while that for the Roma and the users of sign language has to be based on the personality principle. Language legislation for mainland Swedish-speaking population is based principally on the principle of personality, but has some features of the principle of territoriality at the same time. The most important one of those features is linguistic classification of each commune. Communes are to be bilingual if the Swedish-speaking or Finnish-speaking minority reaches or exceeds 8 per cent or 3,000 persons of the population. Otherwise communes are to be unilingual. There are only 21 Swedish unilingual and 43 bilingual communes of all 453 communes in Finland. Language rights based on the principle of territoriality are generally supposed to reach a higher level than those based on the principle of personality. This assumption holds good also in the case of Finland except the case for mainland Swedish-speaking population. They are granted extremely high linguistic rights, though language policy for them is based principally on the principle of personality.